Windows Blue leaks: More Metro, more multitasking

Early build leaks onto the 'Net, finally giving us a taste of what's to come.

Windows "Blue," an update to Windows 8 that is widely expected to arrive later this year, has so far been something of a mystery, with the only information coming from leaks and rumors.

Over the weekend, a build of the software with a date of March 15 leaked onto the Internet, at last giving people the opportunity to see what Blue would contain.

The big news is... Windows Blue looks an awful lot like Windows 8, which is consistent with its likely position as an update to Windows 8. Those hoping that Microsoft would abandon the Metro environment will be disappointed.

What we have instead is a lot of refinements. The Start screen, for example, picks up a new small tile size—shades of Windows Phone 8 here—to allow more tiles to be packed on screen, as well as more layout options. Start screen customization is easier to access, too, with the color and background options on the Start screen's settings page, where they should be, rather than in the Settings app.

The Start screen's customization is shown in a sidebar.

Customizing the Start screen's layout has been changed, too. In Windows 8, you can just pick up tiles and move them around by dragging them up or down to detach them from the background. In Blue, an explicit "customize" mode must now be invoked, perhaps to make it harder to accidentally move tiles around.

It's this settings app where most of the changes can be found. The Windows 8 settings app forces you to go to the desktop Control Panel for lots of mundane settings—for example, anything to do with the network, changing the screen resolution, or setting the system time. These features (and more) are now found in the Metro-style settings app.

Enlarge/ Many more basic settings are now available in the settings app.

The app itself has been reorganized to have a two-level hierarchy for its settings, with most sections having a number of subsections. This is generally sensible; some of the sections in the current settings app are rather long and sprawling, filled with essentially unrelated configuration knobs all bundled together.

The settings app also indicates that SkyDrive is gaining deeper integration into the operating system, with free space management, device backups, and file syncing all exposed.

At this stage, the settings app is extremely incomplete, with many pages still "under construction." It contains a search box which I hope is going to become a permanent fixture, but which at the moment looks more like a debugging aid than a finished piece of user interface.

The other significant difference is how multitasking is handled. Windows 8 sports a snap view, in which two Metro apps can be viewed side-by-side. One app is fixed to a 320-pixel-wide column, with the other taking the remainder of the space. In the leaked Blue version, this has become a whole lot more flexible. First, the split between the apps is now flexible. There seems to be a minimum width of 320 pixels or so, but you can now have, say, a 50/50 split if you prefer.

Enlarge/ The snapped side-by-side view has become a whole lot more flexible. Who knows, perhaps by Windows 9 we'll be able to have arbitrarily sized overlapping apps.

Second, you can now view more than two apps side-by-side. The limit appears to be governed by your monitor's resolution. At 1920×1080, three apps can be shown side-by-side; at 2560×1440, this goes up to 4. The flexible split is maintained.

Internet Explorer has had its version bumped up to 11. At this stage, it includes some marginal improvements in HTML5 support, it gives hints that it has some support for syncing tabs (though it's not clear at this stage what the sync targets will be), and most intriguingly of all, it has changed the version string that it sends to Web servers and scripts. It no longer calls itself "MSIE," and it announces that it is "like Gecko." Gecko is the rendering engine used in Firefox, and most versions of WebKit also purport to be "like Gecko."

If this change is retained, it's clear that Microsoft is trying to stop developers from sending new versions of Internet Explorer CSS and scripting that was intended for very old (and very broken) versions of the browser. It's much more likely now to pick up Firefox-oriented code.

In addition to these system changes, the leaked version of Blue includes some extra bundled Metro apps: a calculator, an alarm clock app, a sound recording app, and "Movie Moments." Movie Moments is an odd little app that takes a video as input and allows pieces of text to be overlaid on the video, producing a short snippet of video as a result.

It's not clear that Movie Moments is a "real application" as much as it is a testbed proof of concept app. Under the hood, Blue appears to offer more APIs and more functionality to WinRT Metro-style applications. One of the areas that seems to have been improved is the introduction of a media API with support for editing, which Movie Moments is probably using.

Also hidden away, and currently with no obvious way of accessing it, there are signs that Microsoft is working on a Metro-style file management app; there's a FileManager app on the system that uses the WinRT API.

This is clearly still an early build, and there's a lot that remains unfinished. One thing is clear, though: Microsoft is serious about Metro. If the leaked build represents the level of Metro functionality that will ship, just as with Windows 8, it will still be necessary to use the desktop for certain tasks. But that number will be substantially lower than is currently the case with Windows 8. Blue is plainly an important step toward making the Metro environment self-contained and complete.

As a dabbling Windows 8 app developer, the flexible snapping makes me a little anxious. Right now I have a full-screen view and a snapped view, which (necessarily) show different amounts of information. Having to expand that for any range of sizes, from the current snapped minimum to half or more of the screen, sounds like it could be a hassle. I suspect a lot of developers will take the easy way out and support the current snapped size, with increasing size after that just increasing the amount of space around controls or the size of the controls themselves. Some apps may be able to take advantage of the space, but I'd prefer to be able to set hard limits as a developer and say "these are the only two ways you can use my app, sorry".

Yeah, this is no time to abandon Metro. Just continue to make it more capable.

Even with the new changes the main function of metro is to take your extremely powerful PC and create a very shitty tablet emulator.

The information content in metro programs is still terrible, the flexibility of it all is still terrible, the whole pushing for MS account is even worse (skype for metro can't log in with skype credentials, you have to create a MS account and then join in skype somehow).

It's a pathetic try to institute 30% MS tax on all windows programs. Sadly the new regime is so useless that only people who will even consider it are the ones that will be better served by an android or apple tablet to begin with.

They clearly haven't learned from their kindergarten UI mistake in Windows 8.

Just wait until Windows 11, when they change the UI again (about every 3rd release). People will be crying, "Microsoft really screwed up this new Windows 11 UI; Windows 8 was the pinnacle of UI design!" It's the same thing that happens every time anyone changes anything. It's the worst thing ever, until people get used to it. Then it's the greatest thing ever, because it's comfortable.

I'm still sticking with Windows 7. And that's all I have to say about that.

Why?

There's a desktop in Win 8. The only metro you'd ever see is the start screen. How often do you browse the Win 7 start menu anyway, in lieu of launching stuff by searching, or from cmd, or from the Run box? You can still use all those in Win 8.

Don't fight UI changes. It leads to nothing but frustration. Learn to use it. The UI will change again sometime soon. And again. And again.

MS appears to be throwing producers under the bus with the continue Metroization of Windows. It is becoming more obvious the only true desktops for producers that will be available will be Mac OS X and Linux.

IMHO, MS does understand the tablet or phone markets very well. These devices, while quite capable, are intended for specific niches that a laptop and desktop are at best very unsuitable for. These niches tend to ones were device portability is supreme and one is willing to sacrifice some easy of use for this portability. Laptops and desktops are best in niches were portability is less important or not at all important and were device flexibility is more important. This divergence should influence the OS design for each niche and it is not likely that "one-size fits all" OS will work well for any device.

It's still woeful compared to the desktop side, even compared to the desktop functionality we had decades ago.

Maybe it's getting there for tablets, but when I want to use a tablet, why on would I choose Windows? (I know why MS want me to, but they still haven't explained to me why I would want to.)

Meanwhile, the desktop we all still use and want to use is festering. It's sad that there's still no indication of the ship changing course or MS even hedging the bet by improving both interfaces in parallel. They still won't acknowledge that most people want nothing to do with the new interface(as it stands), either. If you have to force people to use the new interface, instead of them using it by choice, that says a lot.

What's the latest innovation Microsoft have brought to our desktop computers? I can't think of one from the last few years. This company owns the desktop market and they're doing nothing with it. They're like the dog with a juicy bone, looking at its reflection in the water and wishing they had the second bone, about to bite and lose both.

A couple small Metro changes I'd love to see in this service pack to improve multi-mon support would be 1) Make the window management on the Start screen line up with Metro apps (e.g. can drag it from screen to screen, snap it for a smaller view, etc) and 2) allow full screen Metro apps on all monitors at once (e.g. play a game on one screen while watching Netflix on the other)

I'm still sticking with Windows 7. And that's all I have to say about that.

Why?

There's a desktop in Win 8. The only metro you'd ever see is the start screen. How often do you browse the Win 7 start menu anyway, in lieu of launching stuff by searching, or from cmd, or from the Run box? You can still use all those in Win 8.

Don't fight UI changes. It leads to nothing but frustration. Learn to use it. The UI will change again sometime soon. And again. And again.

When UI change turns my PC in to a very shitty tablet it's time to fight the shit. Not to mention all the moves already in win8 that are pushing the user to use MS online services.It's one thing to have android that is free push for google stuff and another thing for paid software.

The tiles are a superior concept in user interface design. Think of the tiles as a cross between icons and windows. They have characteristics of both.

The greatest problem for RT is the lack of differentiating applications besides IE and Office. It may take a year or two to populate the platform with compelling applications.

The most annoying aspect of WinRT on large screens is the idea to force apps to occupy the entire screen even for small apps such as a calculator. While it makes sense for a phone it is the stupidest idea for any screen larger than 1000x1000 pixels. Blue is not addressing this.

On the other hand, desktop users will probably stick with the classic user interface and never venture into RT so I guess in the long term everything will work out just fine.

The desktop in windows 8 is perfectly fine for getting work done. Once you change the default applications you can almost completely avoid metro except for the start screen, which is actually a very nice and usable change from the start menu, and a few other little bits of metro style ui like the charms menu.

What I've been looking for form Microsoft is whether they continue to develop the desktop or whether they start making metro-style replacements for desktop utilities like the file manager and leave the desktop to languish. If the desktop languishes and its core utilities are replaced by metro apps then my days of using windows are numbered.

When UI change turns my PC in to a very shitty tablet it's time to fight the shit.

Press Win+D, install Start8. Stop whining. You are not the only Windows user. My parents like a simple system, they don't like the Desktop complexity. Be glad that Microsoft didn't tablify the desktop but left it intact.

It's still woeful compared to the desktop side, even compared to the desktop functionality we had decades ago.

Maybe it's getting there for tablets, but when I want to use a tablet, why on would I choose Windows? (I know why MS want me to, but they still haven't explained to me why I would want to.)

Meanwhile, the desktop we all still use and want to use is festering. It's sad that there's still no indication of the ship changing course or MS even hedging the bet by improving both interfaces in parallel. They still won't acknowledge that most people want nothing to do with the new interface(as it stands), either. If you have to force people to use the new interface, instead of them using it by choice, that says a lot.

What's the latest innovation Microsoft have brought to our desktop computers? I can't think of one from the last few years. This company owns the desktop market and they're doing nothing with it. They're like the dog with a juicy bone, looking at its reflection in the water and wishing they had the second bone, about to bite and lose both.

Windows 8 brought some pretty damn significant improvements to the desktop. It might not have done everything you want, but to describe it as "festering" is rather unfair.

IMHO, MS does understand the tablet or phone markets very well. These devices, while quite capable, are intended for specific niches that a laptop and desktop are at best very unsuitable for. These niches tend to ones were device portability is supreme and one is willing to sacrifice some easy of use for this portability. Laptops and desktops are best in niches were portability is less important or not at all important and were device flexibility is more important. This divergence should influence the OS design for each niche and it is not likely that "one-size fits all" OS will work well for any device.

I think you're totally overrating the importance of flexibility and underestimating the problems users of all kinds have with the pile of a mess that the Windows UI has become by always adding things and never removing any.

Of course Windows never was and never will be an OS that "works well for any device" (or user). The question is just which huge part of the market MS will be targeting and I'm fairly sure they know their markets better than you (or me).

But I think Windows is in dire need of a radical make-over and Metro is the way MS is trying to do that.

Just a simple question: Why don't they give us the option to switch metro on and off?

I've been using Windows 8 for a few months now (alongside Windows 7 and OS X 10.8), and think it's an all around improvement. You have to adjust to the start screen instead of the start menu, but the start screen is simply superior (the start menu was trash, and has been for over a decade). You can fit far more content on it, find the icons very easily, as well as get some feedback for any of the 'live' tiles.

The Start Screen and the Charm Bar are pretty much the only two pieces of 'metro' you have to use. The rest you have to go out of your way to touch (you can hide all the Metro apps from the start screen, and uninstall almost all of them entirely).

Where, I believe, Windows 8 would really shine is on any ultrabook with detachable keyboard. The Metro interface is simply superior to the standard desktop with regards to touch input, while the desktop interface is mostly superior when dealing with mouse + keyboard. Microsoft needs to do more work to make it so the Metro & Desktop version of all their apps are basically just two interfaces to the same data (which they've not yet done), so that people can swap between the environments nearly seamlessly. That is the idea behind Windows 8.

Considering the market trends for the last decade (desktops fell to laptops nearly a decade ago, and now notebooks are heading in the direction of falling to tablets), Microsoft's decision seems rather smart. The Surface (non-RT) tablet is quite nice, and give a good '1.0' view of where things are heading. Microsoft knows that, in the coming war between Apple, Google, and themselves, the traditional Desktop is their most powerful weapon... they'd be nuts to abandon it.

They clearly haven't learned from their kindergarten UI mistake in Windows 8.

Just wait until Windows 11, when they change the UI again (about every 3rd release). People will be crying, "Microsoft really screwed up this new Windows 11 UI; Windows 8 was the pinnacle of UI design!" It's the same thing that happens every time anyone changes anything. It's the worst thing ever, until people get used to it. Then it's the greatest thing ever, because it's comfortable.

When UI change turns my PC in to a very shitty tablet it's time to fight the shit.

Press Win+D, install Start8. Stop whining. You are not the only Windows user. My parents like a simple system, they don't like the Desktop complexity. Be glad that Microsoft didn't tablify the desktop but left it intact.

Get your parents a tablet. I need PC for a bit more advanced things than watching youtube.

Issue is not at the moment. win8 has a few annoying issues but you can compensate. Issue is the direction. MS is clearly pushing for a metro future. And that future looks like shit ATM for anyone interested in doing a bit more advanced things with their computer.

At some point the things I have to do in order to compensate for MS wish to force everyone with a PC in to tablet using patter becomes too high and it's time to either drop the platform or stick to the win7 that actually works perfectly and doesn't try to shoehorn me in to some weird MS usage pattern so they can tax every program sold for windows.

Iraqi information minister: 'There is nothing wrong with windows 8 UI, every single user absolutely loves it, we are selling many many copies of windows 8, everything is fine, how are you ?'

Stapling WinRT with Windows 8 and calling the whole thing Windows 8 is probably the biggest marketing blunder Microsoft has made in its history. They alienated friends (some) and encouraged foes (all).

In retrospect Microsoft would have been much better off admitting that Windows and RT are two different things with two different audiences and different markets. It matters little that they share a common API and many of the same OS services. To the casual user they are two completely different animals and calling both of them Windows just confuses the issue. Especially since RT doesn't support an overlapping windowing system.

But then, in retrospect the Iraqi information minister should have never said that there were no American tanks in Baghdad when the camera was showing them crossing the street.

MS appears to be throwing producers under the bus with the continue Metroization of Windows. It is becoming more obvious the only true desktops for producers that will be available will be Mac OS X and Linux.

IMHO, MS does understand the tablet or phone markets very well. These devices, while quite capable, are intended for specific niches that a laptop and desktop are at best very unsuitable for. These niches tend to ones were device portability is supreme and one is willing to sacrifice some easy of use for this portability. Laptops and desktops are best in niches were portability is less important or not at all important and were device flexibility is more important. This divergence should influence the OS design for each niche and it is not likely that "one-size fits all" OS will work well for any device.

I have been saying this since WIndows 8 beta launched. I cannot phantom why Microsoft doesn't see this, Instead of building ontop of Windows 7 phone, expanding it to a Windows Tablet and refining Windows 7 Desktop they create a bastard spawn of the 2. It is such a joke.

Second, you can now view more than two apps side-by-side. The limit appears to be governed by your monitor's resolution. At 1920×1080, three apps can be shown side-by-side; at 2560×1440, this goes up to 4. The flexible split is maintained.

This is funny given that very few consumer monitors support anything above basic 1080.

As a dabbling Windows 8 app developer, the flexible snapping makes me a little anxious. Right now I have a full-screen view and a snapped view, which (necessarily) show different amounts of information. Having to expand that for any range of sizes, from the current snapped minimum to half or more of the screen, sounds like it could be a hassle. I suspect a lot of developers will take the easy way out and support the current snapped size, with increasing size after that just increasing the amount of space around controls or the size of the controls themselves. Some apps may be able to take advantage of the space, but I'd prefer to be able to set hard limits as a developer and say "these are the only two ways you can use my app, sorry".

We had the same problem on the web: Websites designed for widescreens don't look good on smartphones, and vice versa. The solution is called responsive design: Don't hardcode metrics into the UI, but use a flexible layout that rearranges itself depending on the available space. I don't know the UI API for Metro, but I'm sure it includes something more advanced than “make this button 50px wide” (pixels are evil, and meaningless). In the end, responsive design leads to better user interfaces, as you can't make some assumptions on available screen estate.

Second, you can now view more than two apps side-by-side. The limit appears to be governed by your monitor's resolution. At 1920×1080, three apps can be shown side-by-side; at 2560×1440, this goes up to 4. The flexible split is maintained.

This is funny given that very few consumer monitors support anything above basic 1080.

I imagine Microsoft is being proactive about this. Besides which, they exist in the wild right now, so why not support it? It's not logistically difficult, and undoubtedly we'll start to see more >1080 monitors out there in the lifetime of Windows 8. Plus I would guess a lot of MS employees have high resolution monitors sitting around.

Windows 8 brought some pretty damn significant improvements to the desktop. It might not have done everything you want, but to describe it as "festering" is rather unfair.

There's the new Task Manager, and the ribbon in Explorer and... erm... uh... ugly scrollbars that look like programmer placeholders a designer never got around to fixing? Downgrading Previous Versions to File History? I'm stumped.

Oh, it boots faster, which matters for me for about 10 seconds a week.

I'm still sticking with Windows 7. And that's all I have to say about that.

Why?

There's a desktop in Win 8. The only metro you'd ever see is the start screen. How often do you browse the Win 7 start menu anyway, in lieu of launching stuff by searching, or from cmd, or from the Run box? You can still use all those in Win 8.

Don't fight UI changes. It leads to nothing but frustration. Learn to use it. The UI will change again sometime soon. And again. And again.

When UI change turns my PC in to a very shitty tablet it's time to fight the shit. Not to mention all the moves already in win8 that are pushing the user to use MS online services.It's one thing to have android that is free push for google stuff and another thing for paid software.

Thanks goodness Windows 8 does nothing of the sort. And Microsoft's services are just as free as Google's. SkyDrive costs nothing to use, Hotmail costs nothing to use. What on earth are you on about?

As a dabbling Windows 8 app developer, the flexible snapping makes me a little anxious. Right now I have a full-screen view and a snapped view, which (necessarily) show different amounts of information. Having to expand that for any range of sizes, from the current snapped minimum to half or more of the screen, sounds like it could be a hassle. I suspect a lot of developers will take the easy way out and support the current snapped size, with increasing size after that just increasing the amount of space around controls or the size of the controls themselves. Some apps may be able to take advantage of the space, but I'd prefer to be able to set hard limits as a developer and say "these are the only two ways you can use my app, sorry".

Your full screen view already needs to be able to handle multiple sizes; if your full screen view only uses less than a quarter of my 2560x1600 screen and fills the rest with dead space because you designed it to only fit the 1024x768 are left after snapping a sidebar app on a crappy 720p screen, I guarantee I won't be using it twice. People with 900/1080p screens will probably be less than impressed with having half their screen wasted.

Most dialogs can be made to work when freely resized if you just anchor controls to the left/right edges and let the content section in the middle scale freely. Having to deal with software that works badly either because the duhvelopers made everything a fixed size and small enough to fit on a 640x480 screen when win95 was king of the hill and didn't update since infuriate me as much as the ones whose fixed size dialogs were only tested on 1920x1200 screens and ended up hanging off the bottom of the small screen on my netbook.

Microsoft is flat out high if they think this 18-24 month OS cycle will be adopted widely, especially in corporate America. There are organizations still on XP (we are 75% XP still) and they would never adopt such a high-frequency cycle. EVER.